Monday, April 01, 2013

Subject for debate: The golden age of baseball?

We are living in what is unquestionably the golden age of baseball.... The league has achieved a wonderful balance of parity and dynastic success, ....

Most of the league’s ballparks have been updated in the last 20 years...

Online watching allows fans to see every out-of-market game on their computers or on television....

Advanced statistical analysis has given us greater depth of insight into the players and the franchises themselves....The players themselves are more accomplished than ever.

Yet baseball feels to me less relevant, less exciting than ever. Your thoughts?

Posted at 01:31:35 PM

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Not sure about that "less relevant, less exciting than ever" part.

College and minor league baseball are bigger than ever. I moved down to NW Arkansas from Chicago a couple years ago and UofA and the AA local team have nice stadiums (10.5K and 7.5K seating) stadiums that are routinely packed.

The assertion that baseball might be becoming less relevant and/or exciting to folks doesn't have to contradict the assertion that this is a golden age for baseball, though, right? "There's never been a better time to be a fan" doesn't stand in opposition to things like "Fewer folks care." In fact, you need both statements for the stereotypical Slate.com article: "Ironically, while there's never been a better time to be a baseball fan, fewer folks seem to care about the national pastime."

@jpn: I couldn't care less if players take performance enhancing drugs!
It's their bodies & they can do with their bodies what ever they want!

However, games are obscenely long & thus boring, as always, due to TV & its incessant commercials.
Plus the White Sox announcers could make three grand slams in a row sound boring!
I hate Harrelson & his ridiculous cornfed neologisms!

Wow, Garry: "I couldn't care less if players take performance enhancing drugs!
It's their bodies & they can do with their bodies what ever they want!"

I'm going to respectfully and strongly disagree. PEDs wrecked the game in a way that MLB can never get back. Just a couple of examples, but there are dozens:
1. Mickey Mantle's record broken by one after another dirty stinkin' cheats.
2. Hank Aaron's record, one of the greatest in all sports, broken by a dirty stinkin' cheat.
3. Finally, whether one hates the Cubs, loves them, or is totally indifferent: the pure unfairness of them losing a playoff series to the Dodgers a few years back, when the dodgers were carried on the (performance-enhanced) back of a player later proven to be yet another dirty stinkin' cheat....regardless of your opinion about the Cubs, the unfairness of that, to fans everywhere, is a start reminder that PEDs have forever, irretrievably ruined MLB for many, many fans.

I love baseball, but it's hard for me to be a fan when any player could change teams at any time. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember growing up in the 80s and knowing who the players were on my favorite teams because they weren't routinely cycled in and out after just a season or two, and players who stayed with one team their entire career (Tony Gwynn, Chipper Jones, Jason Varitek), while rare, were still much more common than they are today.

@Areader (and everyone else) apologies for the brain cramp! I was referring to the single-season homer record, which of course belonged to Roger Maris, not Mickey Mantle, before it was broken by a succession of dirty stinkin' cheats.

While I'm not a big baseball fan, the ones I talked to who really follow the game agree with jpn.

As I understand their rationale - baseball is one sport that can transcend across generations - it's still 90 feet, wooden bats, 3 strikes, etc. You could compare one great player to another based on their stats and it would hold up.

Granted, it was the 9th inning in a blowout and had started to rain. But it's Opening Day! At Yankee Stadium! And 15 people were there in the 9th inning to see it!

I keep hearing statistics about how attendance and TV revenues are at all time highs for baseball. This is during the same time that baseball has completely fallen off my radar, and now ranks somewhere around semi-pro bull riding in terms of how much I watch or care. I've been trying to figure out reasons why I just completely stopped caring. This is all I can come up with:

- Both individual games and the entire season are way too long and way too boring - 3+ hour games (which feature approximately 38 seconds of live action), 162 game seasons, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

- The Cubs meltdowns in 2003 and 2008. '03 was a stomach punch, but '08 was the real clincher - win 97 games in the regular season and 3 playoff games later (i.e. blink) and it's over. It just made the whole regular season seem so meaningless.

- Numerous other options for more exciting sports to watch, and only about a 1.5 month period where basketball, hockey, or football aren't in-season at the same time (i.e. time to watch golf).

- PED stuff made the whole sport look bad (personally, I don't care if someone wants to inject themselves with radioactive whale turds if it lets them hit 100 home runs in a season - I want ACTION!)

- The experience of going to a game isn't very interesting or fun. Unless you have AWESOME seats and it's a SPECTACULAR day, I can think of about 6,000 things I'd rather do than sit in a ballpark, eat bad overpriced food, and watch a bunch of guys stand around scratching themselves.

"Most of the league’s ballparks have been updated in the last 20 years"...and are ridiculously expensive.

"Online watching allows fans to see every out-of-market game on their computers or on television"....nice option, but over-saturation tends to dull the senses. Most people don't have the time or desire to watch more games. It's actually refreshing to listen to some games on the radio.

"The players themselves are more accomplished than ever"...like all modern sports, most are physically superior (PED or not), but does that really make the game more entertaining?

Several of the reasons he cites for calling this a golden era are possibly reasons why it's not as much a part of the national conversation:

-- What he calls a balance of parity and dynastic success really means: A few major-market teams willing to spend big bucks can keep themselves near the top, but everyone else is reduced to hoping for no more than one great season before cash concerns break up the team.

-- Related to that, players move around so much that the "team" you rooted for three or four years ago is a very different collection of players today.

-- There are so many teams, so many ways to see them, that the idea of there being something special about going to a game is fading.

-- Modern stadia provide so much info on their scoreboards and so many diversions in the stands that the game is not as much the centerpiece.

-- There are so many teams that many players who never would have gotten to the majors are starters now. Maybe modern training helps them use more of their abilities than they would have 30 years ago, but still, there's been a substantial dilution of talent.

-- Rising prices, stadia in the burbs or at least surrounded by an ocean of parking spaces, more night games and other factors reduce the spur-of-the-moment decisions to take in a game.

And, most of all, the biggest reasons baseball isn't as relevant: Ernie Banks isn't playing and Bill Veeck is dead.

Baseball has always been my favorite sport, and it will always be relevant to me for the simple enjoyment of the game itself. I don't let myself get tied up in knots over the PED scandals or who really holds which record. I think sometimes baseball gets held to higher standards than other sports (as AReader pointed out in an earler post). There have always been, and always will be, cheaters who look for any advantage they can get.

Of course there are aspects of the sport that don't appeal to some -- the slower pace, length of games and such. But I still find myself getting excited with anticipation of a new season. I think part of it is the "spring renewal" aspect, leaving the cold of winter behind and looking forward to warm weather, sunshine and baseball.

Almost could agree but the length of the games is a killer. My God you could almost play a double header in the time it takes some of these games to be played. The average length of a Yankees/Red Sox regular season game was over 4 hours that's absurd. I love the game but it is/was never meant for television.

Saber metrics have their place but when you start dissecting Cabrera's triple crown and nit picking it to death with them I think you've gone a little stat happy, that you've lost a little love for the game.

Wendy raises a good point about the DH. 40 odd years later and the two leagues still can't agree on it. both use it or get rid of it. Rather see it go but a least be consistent.

Peds pretty much shredded the value of the sports most hallowed records.

If every pitcher could match Mark Buehrle in efficiency on the mound and if every hitter were forced to stay in the batters box once he had stepped in maybe we could hope for 2 and half hour games?

Yes, baseball games are too long and, probably more damagingly, too slow as there's too much time-wasting in between pitches. This could be largely cured by making the batter stay in the batter's box, banning that stupid ritual of re-tightening the batting gloves (you didn't even swing!!), maybe limiting pickoff throws, etc. Yes, it's irritating that baseball refuses to pick even that low-hanging fruit. But these complaints of "it's too long and slow!" ring hollow when the last two minutes of a close basketball game are unwatchable because of time-wasting and "strategic" fouling, and football games are even longer than baseball games with even less action, proportionally. There's usually far more dead time before/after a football play than the play itself, by orders of magnitude. And yet no one gripes about that. As SandyK says, baseball gets held to higher standards. Not sure why.

@Areader: Like all sports the game has changed in a variety of ways. In the 1950's and very early sixties the average length of a game was 1 hour and 50 minutes. the length of today's games detracts from the sport. I follow it religiously on line and in the papers. Listen to it on the radio while working or doing things around the house. But I cannot watch it on T.V. unless it is a key match up. I find the dead time is brutal.

DaveB: You're right, watching baseball is, or used to be, the national pastime. And listening to it -- it's the ideal game for radio. But watching football has overtaken baseball. As for going to ballparks -- how do people afford it? Bleachers at Wrigley were $1 a seat not that long ago (i.e., within my lifetime). Now? Forget it.

According to Billy Crystal's character in City Slickers, baseball was the one thing that kept his dad and him talking to each other during his teen years. Sports also has that function (to some extent) with my older sons and me. But we almost never talk about baseball. We talk a lot about football, basketball and hockey. Not baseball.

@AReader: Yes the last two minutes drives me nuts not as much as Dean Smith's four corners but close and it's college. It's correctable with a few tweaks. Whether the powers that be will do so is a different matter. Football doesn't bother me as much . I've seen the studies on dead time vs, actual time played and so on. Baseball it's just so maddening and I see no effort or solutions to try to solve the problem which is driving me away from the game. Football is 16 weekends of three hour games. Home Baseball team 162 games on average 3hrs per. 10x as many as your home football team big difference. Too many games that take to long. they need to go back to 154 game schedule and get the World Series over before Halloween.

Can't disagree more about sabermetrics. The "reducing the game to numbers" trope is a straw man erected by people who reflexively disdain sabermatrics without understanding it. It's not about reducing anything - it's about gaining more insight into the game, replacing incorrect "received wisdom" with actual knowledge. If anything, a foundation of more accurate information should only help a sport, even in terms of "mythic value."

@Areader: Sabermetrics does the same thing all stats do except with more information and in some instances minutiae. They t tell what a player did not what he will do. I'll use some stats with the Red SOX since I follow them closely and have some information right at hand. And also Bill James was their consultant.

Sabermetrics:Fred Lynn 1975: .401 OBP to lead AL; 161 OPS-plus, second in AL; 63.2 VORP, fifth in AL; 7.1 Wins Above Replacement, ok -- Actuallly anyone watching him play could see he was having a great year. smooth swing, his defense, andl baseball smarts. So how much more did we learn he had a great year using either measure.

Other Red Sox players whose sabermetrics and intangibles have been in line include Dustin Pedroia, Clay Buchholz, Jacoby Ellsbury and Jonathan Papelbon. .

James, a fairly new consultant for Boston 2003 pointed out that Boston's acquisition of David Ortiz in January 2003 was as much about luck as it was about scouting had submitted a report suggesting Ortiz and Brad Fullmer were sabermetrically identical, and that neither would be a better pick than the other.Ortiz became a superstar. I'm not dissing James I'm saying these stats are overrated.

And that's the problem with all the stats new and old. Sabermetrics work, but just to an extent. luck and intangibles will always be a key variables which you can't quantify.

By any measure new or old Daniel Bard was great in 2011. 3.33 ERA, 0.96 WHIP, 74 SO, 24 BB in 73 innings pitched. James when asked about his future was honest enough to say I don't know. He's been uh, slightly erratic since. I'm lukewarm on Sabermetrics. I think some like OPS are pretty good. Others like UZR are an overcomplicated waste of time. They give the GM's something to point at when things go wrong because in the end no one knows where the next big star may come from . It ain't science no matter how much you try to make it.

In terms of national appeal, the golden age of baseball was 1945 to 1965, when everyone was interested in the game. I recall in high school getting announcements on the status of the World Series games through the afternoon. Everyone was interested in the World Series then. Not so much now. I can't even tell you who was in the World Series last year, but I can rattle off the top of my head that it was Milwaukee and the Yankees in 1958. . .

@Areader: I think sabermetrics has its place and some are very good: OPS, WHIP. Some are over complicated and absurd UZR springs to mind. but here's a story told by James about signing Ortiz when he was a consultant with the Sox : James pointed out that Boston's acquisition of David Ortiz in January 2003 was as much about luck as it was about scouting. James, who consultant for Boston back then, had submitted a report suggesting Ortiz and Brad Fullmer were sabermetrically identical, and that neither would be a better pick than the other.

"We signed David Ortiz rather than Brad Fullmer is Minnesota released David Ortiz at the right time for us. We could just as easily signed Brad Fullmer. A lot of it was luck." There's the essential truth about evaluating talent.

. You are right sabermetrics does provide a more complete picture,but just to a certain extent. And like all stats it tells about the past with absolutely no guarantees for the future. It's a tool and I think people overrate its effectiveness.

Thanks for taking the time, but I'm already a fairly experienced saber guy (got my first Bill James Abstract at age 10, in fact). I agree that many of the new stats are more reflective than predictive, although they do provide at least a probablistic model of prediction, which many people in and outside the game just can't wrap their heads around. For example, I saw an interview with Buck Showalter on ESPN's new "new school vs. old school" show yesterday in which Showalter was asked about predictive models showing that the Orioles would likely regress to the mean after their surprisingly good performance last year. Both Showalter and Harold Reynolds, the "old school" host, just kept repeating that such regression doesn't always happen, won't necessarily happen, and that's why we play the games. Well, duh. But that wasn't the point.

And, as your story indicates, of course there's a lot of luck, randomness and other factors involved too. No one is really saying that advanced statistics can reduce everything down to one number. That's an anti-intellectual straw man invoked by the old-school folks who just want to caricature the new school. Sounds like we agree on the big picture though.

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